Specifically, they wanted to know how I could have over 20 open Tabs at once and still remain sane. The ability to have multiple pages in your browser be seen as Tabs instead of unique windows has been in Firefox for a few years and came to Internet Explorer and Safari more recently.  Each Tab indicates a unique web page and with all of the various on-demand apps, sites, and pages I make use of, having 20 open pages seems to be the rule nowadays, not the exception.

Tree Style Tab Add-On for Firefox

I am one of those people who “get’s nervous” — my words — when I have many things open and cannot easily discern or navigate them. This is why I moved to the Mac and this is why prior to this Add-On I would only have as many Tabs as I could horizontally stack and still read, usually about 4-7, depending on page titles.

So, try this in your Firefox and let me know how it helps you.

Tree Style Tab Add-On for Firefox.

Additionally, here are a few additional tips for Firefox:

• By default, the Tab bar will be organized horizontally at the top like Firefox does without it. Change it to organize them vertically to get the productivity gain.
• When you have multiple tabs open, the first 10 are attached to keyboard shortcuts CTRL/+0 through CTRL/+9 so you can move between the tabs quickly.
• When you want to navigate Tabs in context rather than by number, you can use CTRL-TAB and CTRL-SHIFT-TAB for next Tab and previous Tab respectively.
• Now that you can handle many pages as Tabs at a glance, you might consider bookmarking an entire set of pages as Tabs such as “Shopping” instead of just Amazon.com or WhatSheBuys.com.

These relationships look like this:

ACCOUNT (i.e. Acme, Inc., www.acme.com, 1-800-ACME-INC)
|
|
----- CONTACT (i.e. Joe Smith, joe@acme.com, 555-555-1212)
----- CONTACT
...

This works great when there is a company such as a company client, vendor, or partner and it has employees that are related to it.

However, what happens when the client is an individual person such as someone who bought one of your e-books or a t-shirt? What happens when you are a nonprofit that relates to individual as well as institutional donors?

This is where a fairly recent addition to Salesforce, Person Accounts, comes into play.

Instead of being forced into this parent-child relationship between the Account and Contact, it combines these two objects into one Account/Contact object called a Person Account that looks like this:

PERSON ACCOUNT (i.e. Joe Smith, www.joesworld.com, joe@gmail.com, 555-555-1212)

So, let’s say you started out in Salesforce without Person Accountsenabled or you still find your team creating Accounts and Contacts for B2C individuals. What can you do besides just retyping in all the info in a new Person Account? Can you just convert it?

Well, Salesforce states the only path to change a Contact into a Person Account has these requirements:

1. You must use the Application Programming Interface (API) to do it.
2. You cannot make any other updates or changes to the record at the same time.
3. You must create an Account/Contact pair. That’s one Account with one Contact. The new Person Account will take the Account name.
4. The Account must have a blank Parent Account value.
5. The Contact must have a blank Reports To value.
6. All data in any shared fields (i.e. phone, etc.) between the Account/Contact need to match.*

* I have found that converting a Contact with a mailing address and an Account with no address still works.

Now, the most painful of these steps for a normal Salesforce user is #1. Dealing with the API is a great feature but many stellar admins and users are not familiar with these concepts and are not interested.

Previous discussions I’ve read cover the Data Loader or Excel Connector which can certainly hammer this nail like a sledgehammer but are very developer oriented and overkill for this common task. They are Windows-only apps as well.

Thankfully, there is a much easier way to get this done for Mac, PC, and Linux users on-the-go with less than 10 lines of Javascript from right within Firefox.

More in Part 2.

– Jon